The ruthless, the blind, and
the bleeding victim
Since he came to power last March, war criminal Ariel Sharon is constantly
escalating the crisis in the Middle East. He has bombed Hizbullah and the Syrian
forces in the Lebanon, attacked Palestinians left, right and centre, using every
lethal power at the usurper-entity’s disposal and supplied by the US due to
internal pressures, equations and in pursuit of an imperialist policy in total
disregard of the slogans of freedom and human rights it claims to uphold in the
rest of the world.

The war criminal has steadily progressed from using lethal power against unarmed
stone-throwing protesters who have full right and legitimacy under the
international law to resist an occupation force which happens to be the only
military occupier anywhere in the world in the twenty-first century. Later came
armed carriers, rockets and now we have the unbelievable spectacle of
US-supplied F-16s blasting refugee homes and civilian targets in an entity which
is totally controlled by the attackers from all sides: the victims’ borders
and airspace are fully controlled by the occupation forces and hence they cannot
get any arms or reinforcement from outside. The numbers of small arms, jeeps,
policemen, security forces are all in meagre and token quantities in keeping
with the Oslo agreements.

The truncated Palestine now controlled by Arafat’s PA is a vast prison whose
jailer has gone berserk. Sharon’s soldiers fired upon the Palestinian security
delegation which had gone to meet the Israelis for arrangements to stop
violence!. They have killed Palestinian policemen sleeping in their check-posts
or moving about in their cars. Even the head of PA’s internal security, Jibril
Rajjoub, said to be a darling of the CIA, miraculously escaped an assassination
attempt when his home was bombed from the air using US-supplied technology.
There are indications from Israeli officials that soon Arafat’s movement to
and from the PA will also be banned. At present he is the only person who can
freely go in an out of the vast prison that is PA.

The current developments were very much expected since Sharon has a long history
of criminal activity against the Palestinian victims of the settler-colonialism
known as ‘zionism.’ A person whose personal ranch is situated on the site of
a razed Arab village in the Nagev [Al-Naqab], he has committed such war crimes
as the Qibya massacre of 1956, ruthless ‘pacification’ of Gaza [Ghazzah] in
the wake of its occupation in 1967, and above all the world-famous Sabra and
Shatila massacres of hapless Palestinians in refugee camps on the outskirts of
Beirut in 1982 when he invaded Lebanon as part of a grand scheme to balkanize
the Middle East and place the resulting small statelets under Israeli tutelage..
At the time he boasted that the sphere of Israeli influence stretches from Congo
to Karachi... The grand invasion failed miserably even to secure Lebanon’s
signature on a forced peace deal, and at last for the first time in its short
history Israel had to unceremoniously withdraw from south Lebanon last June
without any negotiations and without any pre-conditions - a clear demonstration
that Israel can be defeated and usurped rights and lands can be reclaimed.

In addition to the sacrifices of the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples,
especially Hizbullah, the Israeli grand plan also failed because it clashed with
the US plans to keep the Middle East under its tutelage. The massive US largesse
to Israel, which is the highest American per capita aid to any country in the
world and keeps spiralling every year, is paid precisely to keep the Middle East
under US and western clutches. But Israel is not expected to take over the
region for itself. The blind US political and material support to Israel will
dwindle if the cost of this support is made unbearable. All Arab, Muslim and
freedom-loving people have to revise their policies not only against Israel but
also against its main backer, the US, which at times is totally isolated in its
blind support to the Israeli outlaw. Oslo was seized by Israel and its US backer
to convince many hesitating countries to believe that Israel was finally ready
to undo at least some of the historic injustices meted out to the Palestinian
people. But close to a decade has now shown that Israel was never serious to do
even belated limited justice to the Palestinian victims. The Palestinian
intifadah erupted precisely because of the Israeli rigmarole and the zionist
habit of endlessly negotiating and re-negotiating issues which should have been
settled long ago even in the light of the schedules dictated by them in Oslo.
The Palestinian state should have become a reality long ago and at least some
refugees should have gone back to their houses and fields and orchards which
still stand intact as left by the rightful owners and are used by the usurpers
in occupied Palestine. Israel is no longer ready to evacuate even from areas
clearly agreed upon with strict deadlines in Oslo. All this convinced the
majority of the Palestinian people to re-start their intifadah as the only
language understood by the occupiers. A total boycott of the US will ensure that
the blind backer exerts some pressure on its ruthless lackey to do justice to
the bleeding victim. q